Photo: Mary Ray/Unsplash
Photo: Ludymila Vitória/Unsplash

Meeting between Brazilian case studies of OceansPact and NoCrises projects

The Brazilian team of OceansPact was pleased to receive a visit from Lol Dahlet, researcher linked to the NoCrises project, also funded by the Belmont Forum. Lol is a PhD student at University of Bremen (Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research - ZMT), supervised by Dr. Marion Glaser, and her research is being carried out in the northern region of Brazil. The goal of the meeting was to promote interaction between the two Brazilian case studies that are working with coastal and marine ...

Participatory assessment of conflicts in Brazil

The Brazilian case-study has published the report Small-scale fisheries and coastal-marine conflicts in São Paulo, that presents the results of a broad participatory assessment of conflicts involving small-scale fishing communities of the São Paulo coastline, southeastern Brazil. The conflicts were assessed through an online survey and participatory workshops engaging stakeholders. The online survey had the goal of assessing the cases of conflicts and the workshops aimed to validate and ...

Photo: Pixabay

Meeting in the Barents Sea Forum

The Norwegian team held their second dialogue forum meeting on February 15, 2022. This “Barents Sea Forum” includes representatives from state, market and civil society organizations, with members from the Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries, Seafood Norway, Petro Arctic, Equinor, the Norwegian Coastal Fishermen’s Association, the Norwegian Fishermen’s Association and Friends of the Earth Norway. The meeting started with a summary and status of the OCEAN PACT project. After that, we discussed ...

Photo: Audun Rikardsen

Life on earth depends on healthy oceans. But our oceans are in decline. There is mounting pressure on finite marine resources because of the increasing number of competing activities, technological advances, and over-exploitation, pollution and climate change.

Conflicts about how to harness benefits from marine resources are widespread, intensifying, and unfolding in unprecedented ways. There are long-standing disputes between activities like fisheries, and oil and gas exploitation. New conflicts are emerging, e.g., sea-level rise could displace millions on low-lying coasts, and submerge some small island nations. Ocean conflicts reflect deep-rooted struggles over ownership, rights, benefits, and human-nature relationships on our Blue Planet.

Surprisingly, ocean conflict resolution is an under-developed field of scholarship and practice. OCEANS PACT argues that ocean sustainability prospects depend on building tailor-made capabilities to analyze, productively manage, and where possible transform ocean conflicts.

We construct a co-designed, transdisciplinary, action research approach. We aim to develop deep insights about diverse ocean conflicts through real-world collaboration of context-specific research teams that include stakeholder partners, social and natural scientists, and conflict resolution experts. Our comparative analysis focuses on conflicts that traverse the Global North and South, in South Africa, India, Brazil, Norway/Barents Sea, Baltic Sea and United States.

We investigate how existing conflict resolution practices help or hinder ocean sustainability. We examine how formal interventions, e.g., law, and informal practices, e.g., negotiation, can be harnessed to unlock the transformative potential of conflict resolution.

The new knowledge gained will be used to develop and test ocean conflict resolution tools and practices. OCEANS PACT will generate significant scientific, socio-political and practice benefits in our case studies, and enable scaling up of insights, tools and conflict resolution practices that foster global ocean sustainability.

Project funding

OCEANS PACT receives funding from Belmont Forum’s Collaborative Research Action on Ocean Sustainability within the framework of the UN Sustainable Development Goal no. 14 (Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development). Belmont Forum is an international partnership of funding organizations, science councils, and regional consortia committed to the advancement of transdisciplinary science.